Book (Dictionary of Psychoanalysis)/ 一本精神分析辞典

Maurice Merleau-Ponty once said, “the body is our general means of having a world,” and it is the most legitimate way of gaining knowledge and experience. Book (Dictionary of Psychoanalysis) reflects our experience of being East Asian in the international and western society. Being “the Other” in the samples of Freud’s experiments, we use white tags to label everything that is sexist, homophobic and racist in Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, to make color-scanned pictures and transferred them onto our skin to integrate the books with our bodies. Then, we use a hand scanner to touch and caress our bodies. Symbolically, the bodies cancel the meaning and authority of the text, but at the same time bear the content of the dictionary and its theoretical context. The movement of hand scanner resembles a voyeuristic view on our bodies, as well as executes a cavalier perspective image-making process (rather than the visual perspective from a camera that imitates human eyes) and is based on a sense of distance. These distorted images once again are manipulated digitally to try to stretch back in order to recover the text, and the shape of our skin became irregular after the process.

The real body is always an unknown one, waiting to be contacted by others to be answered and completed. It’s neither the body as the sample of psychoanalysis, nor the body as the absolute physical/material object. The former causes a Freudian illusion upon the body, by using white, straight, cis-male as default samples for a psychological construction, to inevitably produce the discrimination and bias towards women, non-white, and queer groups. The latter makes the body a mechanical and dull piece of meat, and aggravates the binary oppositions of “subject/object” and “mind/body.” Thus, in a world that is full of possibilities and uncertainties, our life experience becomes the most precious inspirations. The work tends to use our bodies to rethink and rectify the dogmatism in Freudian theory, and to challenge the “human/world” binary in traditional photography.